Jun 23, 2023
Transcript of the video is below:
Can you tell us a little about Villa for You?
Leon Kersten, CIO: We help our customers to rent out their holiday homes, mainly accommodations in Austria. We deliver a full service, meaning we do marketing, customer service, but also things on site like cleaning and key services.
How do you differentiate yourself from existing players in the market?
Larger companies, homeowners are a number and they've got a call center and homeowners have to call a call center. That's not the way we work. We have dedicated agents in all the countries where we host accommodations. Our agents know those accommodations, they know the homeowners, so there's more contact between us and homeowners. Of course we have a website, as you've shown, where guests can browse and book a holiday home, but even more important is that the majority of bookings come in via online travel agencies like Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo, HomeToGo, and Holiday. We've got a lot of communication needed between our company and those larger OTAs.
Can you talk a little bit about what you were looking for when you built out your new application?
We are into the communication business, so all our applications are to individuals so they had to be responsive. Most guests these days and homeowners use their cell phone to communicate with us, so all applications had to be responsive. All the applications had to be individual applications so that we can upgrade or replace applications when needed and if new front ends are needed, but it was a wish of us that the business logic and the database, these applications would share because many functions and procedures are the same for all our target groups.
What led you to choose the technology you chose?
Yeah, we very fastly decided that there had to be a separation between a good front-end application and a back-end system. When we investigated the market, it was our opinion that a good front-end application is now like React, Angular and Vue. Did some studying on reviews. We had some comparison reports on that. We did some testing ourselves and we decided to use Vue as our front-end application. For the back end, so business logic and database, our focus is on the business logic. I think that a database in our opinion is more like a base layer, like an operating system. Of course it has to be fast and it has to be stable, but it's more like a base layer. The business logic is more important.
For the business logic, we looked at PHP, Python, and OpenEdge 4GL, and also there after some studying and we did some tests ourselves, some programming, in all of those languages we found that the OpenEdge 4GL language in combination with the OpenEdge database is by far the best combination. Although some other technologies are open source and OpenEdge has license fee, we've now been working with OpenEdge 4GL and the database for two years and I'm convinced that we made the right decision, and the total cost of ownership using OpenEdge compared to the open source environments is even better. Our learning curve was very fast. So yeah, very happy with OpenEdge as our back-end system.
How do you attract talent to work for your company?
We're only 24 people. We cannot afford a complete separate front-end development team and a back-end development team, so we had two possibilities. Either find Vue developers and learn them OpenEdge 4GL or find OpenEdge 4GL developers and learn them Vue. We decided to find Vue developers and learn them OpenEdge 4GL because the 4GL language is so simple and it's so powerful that it's way more easier to learn Vue people OpenEdge. If you set up your database scheme within the OpenEdge database correctly and use the right terminology in combination with the language, you get very powerful sentences, which are very simple like, "For each booking of guests, find first accommodation of homeowners." Everybody who knows 4GL and knows if you choose the terms that you use correctly, you can read the complete organization only by looking at the database and looking at this 4GL. It's a very powerful combination.
What's next for Villa for You?
Now we simply have to expand. We have to find more accumulations. The homeowner market is a very mature market. All homeowners know the players on the market and the word is out that we are very successful in what we're doing, and we are only limited... Our growth is only limited at the moment by the size of our staff. The more people we can find on all the positions that we have also on the IT business, we can grow very fast. The number of accommodations are coming in and we simply don't have enough people to help all our homeowners at the moment, so if you know some people then we are very happy to take them.
Read the full case study at: https://www.progress.com/customers/villa-for-you-utilizes-progress-openedge-for-their-business-logic-and-reliable-low-maintenance-database-for-a-holiday-home-rental-business
